Lie to Me, episodes 3 and 4

May 24, 2011 at 1:51 am

This is unexpected for me, but I’m liking Lie to Me most out of all the early May drama premieres. I’m not sure what it is — it could be a combination of the Kang Ji-hwan and Yoon Eun-hye, it could be other things.

Things I like about this drama:

1. Kang Ji-hwan. He is so much better when he’s being his regular hilarious self, because once he tries to be serious and straight-talking, I fall asleep. He’s not too slapstick, which I appreciate because Kang can be a little crazy with the slapstick, so I like the subtler sense of humor he brings to the character. I also like his character’s softer moments, the moments where it’s really just a look in his eyes, or a twitch of a smile on his lips, because he can tell a lot without saying.

2. Sung Joon! How surprising is he? I thought this guy looked positively kiddish when I first saw stills, but that voice sounds like the voice of a well-experienced man, ja? (And he’s younger than I am! What the hell?) Granted, his character isn’t very well-developed yet and he’s only had to play very light scenes, but he’s really likable as Hyun Sang-hee and I can totally see myself rooting for him and Gong Ah-jung.

3. The aunt in the chaebol family isn’t too overbearing. Moms/older female relatives in chaebol stories are always shrill fucking nightmares, but I like that Auntie here is relatively low-key and relaxed. I know there’s definitely going to be some stirrings once Gong Ah-jung threatens the image of the company (don’t they always?), but for now, I like that she doesn’t spike my blood pressure whenever she’s communicating with the chaebol.

Things I don’t like about this drama:

1. This is the sort of drama that makes me, as a woman, hate other women. All for female representation in the media, female rights, blah blah blah, but why are women always so annoying to each other in dramas? Why are they always portrayed as trying to one-up each other? Part of this is the fact that the writing is problematic to begin with, and then the other part of it is that this kind of writing stirs negative feelings in watchers, no matter what gender the watcher, because women just have to suffer this kind of fate in stories all the time.

2. Woe is me: lather, rinse, repeat. It’s like each episode isn’t complete until Yoon Eun-hye cries about feeling so wrong, just so wronged, by her first love and by the fact that she isn’t married. We get it. You suffered. You have a shitty best friend, and an asshole first love. We know it’s hard being the one woman out when everyone else around you has seemingly perfect lives.

3. The prospect of marriage. It drives the drama and gets really boring, really fast. It’s like, on the one hand, we know that Ah-jung realizes that she’s only hanging on to the idea of marriage because she sees how bullshit it can be, but then on the other hand, she still really does sincerely feel miserable and “less” of a woman because she is not married. I’m really not conservative so this really drives me crazy. What about just finding a cool person for great companionship and stop fussing about the idea of a social bind? We see how marriage is a superficial entity in all the antagonists’ lives (like So-ran), so let’s obsessing about it, eh?

4. The idea of Yoon-joo. Oh my god, how am I going to sit through this arc of the story? Every time Yoon-joo is mentioned I just feel like I’ve been zapped into a black hole of nothingness that takes forever to fight my way out of, and she hasn’t even REALLY appeared in the main character’s lives in the flesh yet.